Forget Work-Life Balance and Strive for Inner Joy Instead

So much to admire in this piece by Lisa Quast in Forbes. She writes about the desire for work-life balance. She doesn’t have that as a goal. She aims for inner joy instead.

“You’ll never love 100 percent of your job. That’s OK. I propose that a better definition of success is being able to find inner joy in the little things we each do each day throughout our lives. Finding inner joy is about waking up and being thankful we have a job to go to. It’s about getting excited to finish a project on time and having achieved the objectives. It’s about coming up with ways to make mundane tasks more enjoyable for ourselves and others. It’s about all those little things in life…because our lives are built upon the little things we do each day, not the big milestones that happen once every several years.”

Quast writes that so much depends on which stage of life you are in. “There will be periods in your life when you are single and able to dedicate most your time to work and your career. There will also be phases, such as when you have children, when you’ll have less time for your career because you’ll put more emphasis on your family. As the circle of life continues, you may find that you have more time, once again, for career or personal pursuits when your children are grown. Life is filled with peaks and valleys, where you will spend more time in certain pursuits and less in others. That’s OK, and it’s perfectly normal. Help me shatter the myth that people should strive for work-life balance, because it’s an unrealistic goal. The next time someone tells you that you need better work-life balance, ask the person why they said that. The reality is they’re probably comparing their life to yours – and, most likely, they’re at a different stage than you’re at,” she says.

Here’s the pay-off. “Stop worrying about being in work-life balance and celebrate the times when you are off balance, as these are usually the times when you will learn the most. The key to success isn’t happiness, it’s being able to maintain your strength of inner joy through the good times as well as the bad.”